Category: vRops

Have you ever wanted to export settings from vRops, either as a form of backup or to migrate to another installation? Then you know how cumbersome it can be to find all the settings and export them one by one and also remembering to get it all. To help me get this task done I have created this Powershell script which uses the vRops API to export the settings to xml files which can be easily be imported if or when needed. The list of settings being exported: ActionDefinitions AlertDefinitions AlertPlugins Authentication Sources Email Templates GlobalSettings Groups, their role and […]

Were onsite at a customer, and they were discussing if it was possible to see in vRops when a vMotion occurred. I told them that there were no such metric or property in vRops, but I knew a way to see when ever a vMotion had occurred. The way it works is by looking, on a virtual machine at the “OS Uptime” and “System Uptime” metrics. The rule is rather simple. If “OS uptime” is not below 300, ie. the OS has not been started/rebooted within the last 300 seconds and the “System uptime” is 300 or less the VM […]

This is going to be a short blog. I just want to draw your attention to some new metrics (At least I have not noticed them until vRops 6.6). These seen below are available on clusters and tells you if there are room for more VMs are not. The metric is called “Is Green For Placement” and simply gives you a value of 0 or 1, which equals to false or true. So if “Is Green For Placement” is 1 or true, it means that there is room for more VMs else the value would be 0 or false. Pretty […]

I’m working with some large customers. One of the problems with scaling IT, is the disjoint between knowing what the IT landscape looks like and thinking you know what it look like. Or put in other words, the large an organization the less every employs knows about one another’s doings. This creates gaps between IT teams. Network may know how they setup the network, but they might not know what the server team plugged into their network. Exactly such an issue one of my customers had. Every time a vlan was missing from a vlan truck or another network problem […]

This is just a quick guide to the vRops upgrade path. I work a lot with vRops in different aspects. As of late I have been running in to a few environments which has not kept up with vRops’s release cycle. Needles to say vRops has come a long way from 5.8 or 6.0. Last week vRops 6.5 was release and once every quarter(or so) a new release will come out. In that sense, it is good to know how to upgrade from one release of vRops to the next or more so to the latest. vRops does not require […]

If you have not hear of vSphere Optimization Assessment(VOA), I do not blame you. It is one of the assessments VMware does not talk to much of. It is a partner tool(management pack for partner) used together with vRops. The title says it all, it is all about optimizing the resources you already have. So instead of always buying more hosts or storage, you can optimize your current environment and save money. The way it works is it utilises the intelligent of vRops with some new reports. Based on this report your VMware partner can give you a detailed overview […]

One of the areas in where vRops 6.3 has been getting a huge improvement is Super Metrics. You can read about vRops 6.3 enhancements here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/vrops-6-3-walkthrough-new-features#SuperMetricenhancements It might seem some what trivial – the enhancements. The addition of a few new operators. I guarantee you it is not, these new operators are a game changer for Super Metrics. Lets recap all the new operators Operators Function Example [] Array [A, B, C] == Equal 1==1 != Not equal 1!=2 < Less than 1<2 <= Less than or equal 1<=2 > Greater than 2>1 >= Greater than or equal 2=>1 || […]

I have from time to time some issues with getting vRops authentication working correctly or applying the correct rights to the user such as they are able to do the assigned tasks. To help troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I always jump to Log Insight to get a full understanding of the issue. Well you could jump into vRops nodes and do it via linux. I just find this a lot easier, if you ask me. As Log Insight isn’t tuned to understand vRops authentication. I have had to do a little digging my self. As it turns out, and […]

One of the new features in vRops 6.3 is the documentation and I assume support for the Cluster Management API aka Casa API. I have in the past documented some of these Cluster Management API calls. In blog posts such as, vRops undocumented API calls which is from vRops 6.2 or Exploring vRops Internal API going even further back. Luckily for us all, the vRops team have now added documentation to the Casa API, making it even easier for all to consume. First things first. How do you access it. Just like the regular API the documentation is contained within […]

Over time I have had the please of using different API calls to vRops. To begin with a lot around the official vRops API, as can be seen here. Some of it was documented in the internal API some were not which can be seen here. In this blog post I explorer some more API calls. The calls here is of a different nature. Were as the prior was around doing precis calls to get a specific result. These call are of a more generic nature. These have to do with the vRops environment. These calls can be used to […]